Added to the National Register of Historic Places on January 11, 1985

Earlier this year, Architectural Digest named the Hollywood Station branch of the US Postal Service one of the 11 most beautiful post offices in the world. Let’s call that a little bit of Tinseltown hyperbole. While it’s a classy enough place to send a package full of Walk of Fame t-shirts and Hollywood sign snow globes to your grandma back home, Hollywood Station is neither as grand nor as aesthetically rooted in its surroundings as the world’s most memorable post offices.

Yet this is a historically significant post office all the same, both for its role in Hollywood history, and as an example of the “starved classical” architectural style that was favored for federal buildings during the Great Depression.

By the time this post office was completed in 1937, Hollywood was already long known as one of America’s cultural engines. But let’s dig back further for some context. A generation earlier, Hollywood was just developing from its early days as a patchwork of citrus groves, with isolated mansions and hotels dotting the area. In 1887, Harvey and Daeida Wilcox had purchased 100 acres of land south of the Cahuenga Pass and named it “Hollywood,” with the idea of subdividing it into a new town. Hollywood incorporated as a city in 1903, and was annexed by Los Angeles in 1910. The first Hollywood film, Cecil B. de Mille’s Squaw Man, was shot in 1913. 

The small but growing Hollywood community of the early 1900s (several sources quote a figure of 500 residents in 1900) was served by a tiny post office on the ground floor of the Sackett Hotel, at the modern day intersection of Cahuenga and Hollywood Boulevard. The Sacketts’ daughter Mary was the assistant to the office’s first postmaster. 

During the 1920s, the region’s population spiked as a flood of transplants moved to LA from the east coast, Midwest and beyond, many of them hoping to find jobs in the burgeoning film industry. Hollywood needed a larger, more modern post office to serve the rapidly expanding populace, and the Hollywood Station fulfilled that role. 

The groundbreaking ceremony took place on July 5, 1935, with Will Hays moving the first clump of dirt with a steam shovel. Hays’s ceremonial role was doubly appropriate: as Chairman of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, and supervisor of the Motion Picture Production Code, Hays had an outsize impact on the movies coming out of Hollywood. And just before he took the gig in 1922, Hays was the US Postmaster General for a year under Warren G. Harding. Apparently he was a pretty good one, too. He started a merit system, inspired technical changes to improve the viability of airmail, and started informational campaigns to convince people to write addresses so postal workers could actually read them.

Like so many government buildings from that era, the new post office was funded as part of President Roosevelt’s New Deal program to spur the economy during the Great Depression. Across LA County you’ll find public schools and post offices (see Burbank Post Office, visit #41), DWP headquarters and community centers (see Great Hall/Long Hall, visit #155) from this era. Many were built in the 1930s and early ‘40s by the Works Progress Administration in cooperation with local governments, who would employ local labor as part of the relief program. Evan Kalish of the excellent Postlandia blog clarified for me that for buildings operated by the federal government, like post offices, the US government paid contractors directly.

The feds commissioned architect Claud Beelman and the firm of Allison & Allison for the new post office at 1615 Wilcox Avenue, right around the corner from the old one at the Sackett Hotel. In stark contrast to Beelman’s ostentatious work on the Eastern Columbia Building (1930) and the Allisons’ luxurious CalEdison Building (1931), they designed Hollywood Station in the “starved classical” mode. Think of it as a toned-down version of the neoclassical style used for the White House and the US Capitol Building in Washington DC. 

At Hollywood Station, you have fluted pilasters separating the window bays at the front entrance, offering a modernist take on the ornate Corinthian columns that would have been used if it were 1800 instead of 1937. There’s a thin reddish belt wrapping the building in an acanthus pattern, and circular medallions atop each of the pilasters on the front entrance. Two bronze lanterns flank the entrance, and the decorative window grilles bring some art nouveau flair. Aside from that though, the outside of Hollywood Station is pretty austere – a reflection both of modernist trends away from ornamentation in federal/political architecture of the time, and also a convenient way of lowering construction costs. 

The interior of Hollywood Station is similarly low-key in its glamor. Brass window frames and Grecian patterns trimming the ceiling do offer a hint of grandeur, while terrazzo floors in two-tone green, red and yellow give perennial Christmas vibes. A mahogany relief sculpture carved by Gordon Newell (first husband of actress Gloria Stuart, who played Old Rose in Titanic) and Sherry Peticolas fits in nicely with much of the “social realist” work commissioned by the federal Treasury Relief Art Program in the 1930s. The panel depicts a person holding two horses, supposedly a reference to the Pony Express, though you might well ask why there aren’t any mailbags? 

As of late 2022, the most eye-catching art at Hollywood Station is a sequence of enlarged postage stamps mounted above the service stations, featuring film legends Ingrid Bergman, Marilyn Monroe, Shirley Temple, Charlton Heston, Gregory Peck and Bette Davis. 

But the first one you see after entering is Elvis Presley, whose 1993 stamp was “the most popular US commemorative stamp of all time,” according to the Smithsonian Postal Museum. Back when it was released, obsessive Elvis fans would deliberately send mail with the stamp to a fake address, just so they could get a letter with Elvis’s picture and the message “return to sender” scrawled on it. Guess where Elvis recorded “Return to Sender?” At Radio Recorders studios, located at 7000 Santa Monica Boulevard – just five minutes away from the Hollywood Station post office.

Sources & Recommend Reading

+ “Early Views of Hollywood (1850 – 1920)” (Water and Power Associates)

+ The Elvis Stamp: America Elects a King (Smithsonian National Postal Museum)

+ Gomery, Douglas, ed.: A Guide to the Microfilm Edition of The Will Hays Papers (University Publications of America, 1986 – via Queen’s University)

+ “Heart of Hollywood: History” (Heartofhollywood.la)

+ Hicks, Jerry, Rene Lynch & Steven Herbert: “GET ELVIS THIS WAY: Some county residents…” (Los Angeles Times, February 6, 1993)

+ “Hollywood Post Office – Los Angeles CA” (The Living New Deal)

+ McLaughlin, Katherine: “The 11 Most Beautiful Post Offices Around the World” (Architectural Digest, May 9, 2023)

+ Robertson, Doug: US Post Office – Hollywood Station’s NRHP nomination form

+ Sudhalter, Kim: “Have You Ever Wondered…Who Is This Man?” (Hollywood Partnership, August 7, 2015)

+ “Work Begun on Hollywood Postoffice” (Los Angeles Times, July 6, 1935 – accessed via ProQuest)